>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]   >> Carolyn Brown: I'm Carolyn Brown.
I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the John W. Kluge Center here at the library.
And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you
to this afternoon's panel and discussion,
The Evolving Moral Landscape -- Perspectives on the Environment:
Literary, Historical, and Interplanetary.
Before we begin, though, I would ask
if you would please turn off your cell phones
so that they don't go off during the discussion and interfere
with the speakers and the recording.
Today's event is sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center,
which was created through an endowment in the year 2000
by John W. Kluge to create a venue on Capitol Hill where some
of the world's finest scholars might have opportunities to come
into informal conversation with policymakers.
We have scholars and fellows basically at two levels,
some of the world's most senior scholars.
And these are the ones who tend to have the opportunities to speak
with Congress, but also a very robust group of junior scholars
who we hope over time will become some of the world's senior scholars.
And together we form a really wonderful,
lively academic intellectual community.
One of the great advantages of a community of course is
to have the kinds of informal conversations
that just arise spontaneously.
In addition, we sponsor events such as this one.
Paneled discussions are a little unusual for us.
Most of what we do are lectures,
but also small conferences drawing primarily on the expertise
of our scholars and fellows.
If you haven't done so, you can sign up for more information
about the center in the back; we can send you emails.
We also have back there --
I hope you picked them up -- bios of today's panel.
So this panel came about kind of spontaneously because we looked
up one day and we had three different scholars all working
on environmental issues but coming at them from different directions.
And we thought this was an opportunity
that we should take advantage of.
Sometimes you create opportunities and sometimes they kind of pop up,
and that is the case here.
Just a few words of introduction as I've been sort
of thinking about this issue.
In the 19th Century people spoke about nature.
Today we talk about the environment a good deal
or perhaps take a longer view and speak about the earth.
And each of these words -- and there are others of course --
point to a particular physical phenomena.
But their connotations are very different; the world views
in which they come from are very different.
"Earth" puts us in the domain of astronomy.
"The environment" seems to put us in the domain of concerns
about long-term sustainability of human life
and a certain level of activism.
And "nature" almost has a kind of, I don't know, 19th Century,
early 20th Century ring to it
where one is less politically potent I think.
And we tend to think of the word "nature"
as signifying something that's benign, maybe pleasant --
nature walks we might say.   So depending on what we call the It,
we bring a different kind of perspective.
And we know there is an It, right, because we're standing on it,
we breathe its air, we walk on it, but what we call it really comes
from kind of different perspectives.
It's a little bit like the, you know, the proverbial blind man
and the elephant: Depending on what part
of the elephant you touch you get a different definition
of whether it's the rope for the tail or it's a pillar for the leg,
etc. What's less obvious, I think, is that each of these words
or phrases we use to describe the It comes
with certain moral implications that are either embedded
or sometimes more stated.
I think the environment has a pretty strong moral punch to it.
And so when we were thinking about how to put together this group,
the term "moral landscapes" came up because we really wanted to think
about the moral implications of the connotations embedded in the words.
And of course "landscape" is yet another word --
maybe more limited -- for the It that we're talking about.
All of our three panelists today are currently scholars
in the Kluge Center.
They each bring a different set of disciplinary tools
to talk about the subject.
The scientist here is David Grinspoon.
Comes out of the field of astronomy.
And he is our first Baruch S. Blumberg NASA LC Chair
in Astrobiology.   Just remember the astrobiology part.
Our historian, Jean-Francois Mouhot, is a historian.
He specializes in environmental history and is focused especially
on the history of Haiti, but also looking at slavery.
And in literature we have Matthias Klestil,
who is a literary scholar working on African-American literature.
And I would say Matthias is --
actually, our panel is also international: David is American;
Jean-Francois, as you might guess, is from France;
and Matthias is from Bavaria.
So in terms of our perspectives we have disciplines,
we have different nationalities, and I really think that the spread
in background also contributes the difference in perspective.
And I think that will be especially clear as we proceed.
Our format is simple and kind of informal.
Each of our scholars will take about five minutes
to present his basic perspective on our subject -- earth, environment,
or nature -- however you want to call it.
And then we're just going to let the conversation fly.
And they will talk among themselves;
they will ask questions of each other.
I may ask some questions, but I may also entirely stay out of it.
And then at a certain point we'll see how the conversation goes.
I will turn to the audience and see if you have questions
that you would like to ask.
So without further ado, we'll start with David
on my right, and take it away.   >> David Grinspoon: All right.
Thanks a lot, Carolyn, and thank you all for coming this afternoon.
It's really a thrill for me to be here at the Library of Congress
at the Kluge Center as the first Astrobiology Chair.
And one thing I wondered when coming here -- I showed up in November,
I'm still fairly new -- was I knew it was a great opportunity to focus
on a project and use the resources of the library,
but I didn't really sort of know how I would fit in because I'm,
I believe, the only physical scientist here
and maybe the only physical scientist ever at the Kluge Center.
And so I wasn't sure, you know,
what kind of a scholarly community I would find for myself.
But it's been really a delight to interact
with the other scholars here and realize that somewhat surprisingly
to me we do have a lot to talk about,
and some of us are really studying some of the same questions
from very different viewpoints.
One of the first people I spoke to, in fact,
at the first lunch I went to was Jean-Francois.
And he told me he was an environmental historian,
and I thought, "Well, in a way that's what I am, only I'm thinking
about history of sort of billions of years of the earth and he's thinking
on more sort of human civilization, human history timescales."
But, you know, it was very fruitful for me meeting him.
He said, "Well, here you should read this, you should read this,
and talk to this person."
And right away it was this sort of goldmine of connections.
And similarly, meeting Matthias and the other scholars here and finding
that in a sense it really is just looking through our own frames
at some of the same questions.   So hopefully this will be --
I know this will be fun for us this afternoon.
Hopefully it will be fun for you guys, too.
The project that I'm here for, I'm studying the Anthropocene
through the lens of astrobiology.
And you're going, "What the heck is he talking about?"
So let me explain those two terms.
The "Anthropocene" is the phrase that scientists
and some other people are increasingly used
to describe the time of earth history that we are at now.
It's an attempt at a geological term that describes the times
of human influence on the earth.
And in fact, there is a proposal now to the body that sort
of officially keeps the geological timescale --
you know, with the Cretaceous, and the Jurassic, and, you know,
these time periods you've heard about --
there's a proposal to make a new official time
in that geological timescale called the Anthropocene to mean the time
that we're in now, and to recognize
that humans are now changing the earth as a kind
of new type of geological force.
And it's a phrase that's really had a lot of resonance not just
in scientific circles, but now
in the environmental movement it's catalyzed some new interesting
arguments that I'll try to get into a little bit
about how we should perceive the Anthropocene, should we welcome it,
should we fear it, should we deny it?
Is it not a good term?
And then scientists are grappling with it, too.
And so I just think it is a really neat way to encapsulate
and recognize that we have entered a new phase of the earth's history
for better or worse in which humans are really a dominating influence.
Now, astrobiology is the field that I come from.
And it's a relatively new sort of metadiscipline
that combines astronomy, biology -- obviously from the name --
but also the earth sciences in an effort to understand the potential
for life in the universe elsewhere.
And a lot of that has to do with studying life on earth and trying
to understand what are its universal qualities and needs,
and then we look at the environments we're learning about elsewhere
in the universe and try to understand where there may be life.
Now, how is that related to the Anthropocene?
Well, my goal is to try to perceive and describe what's happening now
on earth due to human influence
from almost an interplanetary perspective.
From not the ten thousand-foot view that you hear about, but, you know,
the hundred billion-mile view, looking at earth
as a distant planet, looking at our history.
What is really new and different now, and then how does
that perspective illuminate our choices going further?
And even from the perspective of astrobiology, what does that say
about the prospects for advanced life on other planets?
Because what's happening on earth may or may not
in some way be playing out elsewhere.
So one thing that's neat about planetary science,
which is my background field, is that it has
for a long time had a sort of ethical wing,
which I think is a little bit unusual for a science.
Believe it or not, NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection,
and there are people whose job it is to worry
about in a sense the ethical part of what we do on other planets.
Because if you think about it, we have the potential
to change other planets, we have the potential
to bring things back that could affect earth.
And to its great credit, NASA and the other space agencies
of the world, they take this seriously and they employ scientists
and even some social scientists and people from the humanities
to address these questions as best we can.
And so there is a history of thinking about space science
from an environmental ethics perspective.
And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use
that experience to see
if it reflects how we think about the earth.
To give you one example of what I'm talking about:
You've all seen pictures from these rovers we have on Mars now,
the two Mars exploration rovers that got there in 2004 and the new one,
the Curiosity rover that arrived last year.
And when you picture one of those iconic views
of these beautiful Martian landscapes with the sand dunes
and the rock outcrops, and then coursing
over that landscape there are these rover tracks;
this sort of haunting view of this pristine landscape
that has been presumably left alone for billions of years
and then these tracks coming across it.
Now, when you see those pictures how does that strike you?
I think there are two -- or at least two -- ways that you can view that.
One is it's like dune buggies carving
up a pristine beach, you know?
Here is this beautiful untouched landscape,
and then here are these vandals that came along
and cut it up with a vehicle.
But another way you could view it is imagine the land areas of earth
that for billions of years never had any creatures moving
on them, no animal life.
And then imagine the first animal that came onto the land
and the little tracks, the little fossil tracks we can find
of that first animal making a new step in evolution.
You could look at the rover tracks as analogous to that,
which I think has a different emotional connotation.
I confess I see it more as a latter.
But I'm just giving you that image as an example
of different ways we can perceive the same question.
And then you turn that around to earth.
On earth we're so used to thinking of the human influence
on the environment in this very tangled way
because we arise from that environment.
We don't usually have that clean experiment of an environment
that we are completely and truly removed from.
And the Anthropocene is focusing these questions of the relationship
between humanity and nature in a new way.
And it's part of this argument I alluded to that is raging now
in the environmental community of: Should we be pragmatic?
There's ecopragmatism where you recognize, "Yeah,
we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity,
and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness,
we recognize that's an illusion and we proceed under the new knowledge
that we live in fact in a human-dominated planet."
And then there are these more purist movements within environmentalism
that say, "No, that's surrender.   That's wrong, that's betrayal.
We should seek to protect wilderness and not give up and admit
that we live in a human-dominated planet."
So as we go forward into the future the Anthropocene serves as a sort
of locus for some of these questions of how do we view --
is nature something that we can even think of meaningfully anymore
as separate from humanity, or do we acknowledge that now having arisen
from nature we are actually running this place?
So with that, I think I should conclude --
there's obviously a lot more to say --
and let my colleagues say something about their perspective.
And then we'll talk.
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: Thank you, David.
I should probably first acknowledge that if people like David
and NASA people did not exist,
I probably wouldn't be here for one simple reason.
Environmental history was born out of, you know,
the wider environmental movement in the 1970s.
It's kind of a product of this environmental movement.
And the environmental movement has deep roots with the way that --
especially the first picture taken from space of earth, not of the moon
but this first picture of earth, you know, "Earthrise" it's called.
It's the most -- it's a picture that has sold most in the world, I think.
So it's a picture that you've probably seen all
of you in this room.
And this picture of the earth from space had a major impact
on the environmental consciousness especially in the western world,
and a lot of people became attracted to the environmental movement.
And especially by seeing this small planet as, you know,
spaceship earth, a fragile planet that it's alone
in the universe, it could die one day.
It has a limited amount of resources.
And the impact of the picture taken by NASA --
and in fact we can about later but there's a history
about this picture written by a British scholar,
and it was apparently taken by mistake.
I mean, it's a guy in the space shuttle that went to the moon
that took the picture kind of looking backwards.
Nobody had thought about taking this picture.
And, you know, he just took it with his personal camera.
So that's an interesting story.   I like stories.
Now, I'd like to come back to the implications
of what David just mentioned before, which is the entry of humans
into this new geological era called the Anthropocene.
So it's an era where we've come to realize --
and environmental resurgence have contributed to this.
I'm thinking in particular of the work of John McNeill and his book,
Something New Under the Sun, that documents this huge impact
that humans have had on the planet in the last hundred years.
So this huge impact that humans have had on the earth
that we only start gradually
to realize has all sort of moral implications.
And I'd like to do a little detour to try
to grasp how these moral implications might play
out in the future.
You know, if you think about how moral landscape evolves,
if you think, for example, of the issue of slavery.
Slavery -- most scholars working on slavery still wonder today,
"What is the trigger that transformed an institution --
the peculiar institution --   that used to be regarded
as something fairly normal maybe a necessary evil,
but something that you really couldn't do without?"
How this came -- that at the end
of the 18th Century certainly slavery became something
that was increasingly regarded as something unacceptable and evil.
And this is a question that really hasn't really found any good answers
so far.
There's still are lots of discussions among scholars,
but the fact that it's still debated is
that there's not really one single answer.
I've contributed a little bit to this debate
and I'll come back to this later.
But I'm going to give you an example.
In 1820 -- you might be familiar with the Haitian Revolution,
which was a slave revolt in Haiti -- the country that became Haiti,
it was called Saint-Domingue; it was a French colony.
The slaves revolted during the French Revolution through the masses
and became independent in 1804.
Now, in 1825 France obtained from Haiti -- extorted you might say --
quite a big sum of money from Haiti to pay back for the loss
of their properties, i.e. their slaves,
and to offer Haiti diplomatic recognition.
Haiti was very isolated as a country because no country --
the US, France, and most western countries --
didn't want to recognize Haiti
because it was irreparably born out of a slave revolt.
And the point I wanted to make is that this money that Haiti had
to pay to the former masters, which we found outrageous today --
I certainly do -- at the time was considered normal.
You know? France had lost property, so it was normal
that there would be a compensation for this loss of property.
That was something that was considered widely acceptable
by people at the time -- obviously white people.
But even in Haiti it wasn't that much of a problem.
You know, it was considered part of the order of things.
And interestingly, in 2003 Jean-Bertrand, then President
of Haiti, asked for this money to be paid back to Haiti,
which would be equivalent to about 20 billion Euros in today's money.
And that triggered a stir as well.
But you might wonder what this has to do with the environment.
Why am I talking about this?
I believe that there might be some similar requests for reparation
in the not-too-distant-future from countries in the global south today,
you know, who request for reparation for something that we do today
in our countries and all over the world
that we think is perfectly normal, but that might come
with some moral implications in relation
to what David just described -- the Anthropocene.
I'm talking, you know, if you think about, you know, driving cars
or taking planes or, you know, drying your clothes
in your dryer, for example.
You know, activities that we all do on a regular basis
that we find normal and nobody really find this morally appalling
or anything like that.
Now, if you think about the implications of the use
of these machines all rely on fossil fuels.
So gas, oil, and so on and so forth.
If you think about these issues in the light of the Anthropocene
about the fact that we are now altering especially the climate
of the earth, but also that we are disrupting a lot of other things
through our activities, this might in the future be regarded
as activities that are not morally neutral.
And I'm going to give you just a couple of examples.
The use of a car, for example, relies on oil, okay?
And oil is not morally neutral even today.
If you think about the way that we have to procure oil --
how do we get oil in our tanks -- there are several implications,
moral implications about this.
For example, you know, if you think about the Gulf War, for example,
in 1991 and the 2003 and 2004 Gulf War II Iraq War, you know,
there are good reasons to think this was linked somehow
to the procurement of oil.
There are also implications in the way that we use oil for pollution
and this being, for example, more people killed by pollution --
atmospheric pollution -- in the 20th Century than by World War II.
But there's also one issue of the big issue of climate change
that might, you know, fundamentally change the way we see the use of oil
as something morally neutral or not.
And so I'll stop there because I've already talked too long.
But, you know, I think this is some reflections on this issue
of Anthropocene and moral.
>> Matthias Klestil: Well, I want to start out describing what I'm doing,
what I'm bringing to the table with, well,
sort of an anecdote or an observation.
And it seems fitting that this might be
about Barack Obama considering that I'm in DC.
In August 2009 now reelect President Barack Obama
and his family took a trip
to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon.
And at first glance this may seem, you know, perfectly normal
and not extraordinary because he was just continuing and becoming part
of a long tradition of American leaders visiting Yellowstone and,
you know, generally the vast natural sights --
parks, resources of the nation.
What was peculiar in Obama's case, however, was, well,
how the announcement of the trip soon triggered an echo
across the media that was bent
on the question basically whether the First Family was actually going
to be camping outside in the wilderness,
especially after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs
on a press conference that was then held during the visit eventually
confirmed such rumors to be true,
acknowledging that Obama had always been an outside guy
and expanding more specifically
on the President's fascination with fly fishing.
A whole array of responses emerged from that.
Some voices began to explore it and caricatured the idea
of the President standing on top of the Grand Canyon gazing
into its depths by drawing analogies to his staring at the alleged depths
of his financial politics.
And others, you know, most of the debate evolved actually about,
you know, mildly amused imaginings and comments
on Obama's rather unsuccessful fishing endeavors.
Gibbs actually confirmed that he always wanted to do that
but that he never got hold of any fish.
So what became perceivable throughout the exchange was how
deeply unfamiliar the image of not only Obama,
but of an African-American
in general enjoying a frontier setting seemed to be.
Especially on the Internet you have many commentators who drew attention
across blogs to the oddness of this idea.
And sometimes in connection with statistics, you know,
documenting considerable lack
of African-American visitors to US national parks.
And so to quote one blogger here they basically asked quote
"As Obama goes camping, why don't more blacks do the same?"
So in this way responses reveal, as Jennifer James --
a professor of Africana studies here at George Washington University --
put it quote "camping as a racially-loaded signifier
which points to the reification of spatial imaginaries and discussions
of blacks and nature," end of quote.
They point in this way to central underlying question of this debate,
and I think a paradoxic intention involved many
of the question being why and how exactly is it
that the first African-American US president, after all well-known
for his greenness in terms of political terms,
is much less obviously felt to be capable of connecting
in an immediate way to nature to pull up the nature man so to speak
that has predecessor in office, whose many almost iconic images
of playing with his dog on a Texas farm despite his evidently not
environmentally-friendly policies to say the least,
appear to go down so much easier in the public mind?
So why is it in a sense that there is something odd
about Obama fly fishing?
My research broadly speaking is a dive into the roots
of such questions from cultural studies,
literary studies perspective into so to speak the cultural unconscious
that triggers such responses and resurfaces in such debates,
as well into the still often-held assumption
that African-American culture were largely indifferent
to environmental concerns, which I think is very unjustified
if you can say that, for example,
the environmental justice movements and activism.
So I'm aiming at writing a sort of literary history of this phenomenon
and consider therein African-American literature
of the 19th and early 20th Century with a focus on narrative fiction
and autobiography -- so no poetry.
And I trace an environmental consciousness ethos
and ethos therein.
I should say here that I'm using the term
"environmental" in a very broad sense.
And so I'm not using it in the sense
that we commonly understand it today.
You know, we might not find much if we think
about African-American literature in terms of having an explicit activist
or conservationist/preservationist ethics underlying.
So instead I'm implying the wider definition
of environmental knowledge, what I call environmental knowledge
as broadly understood the ways in which humans enter
into epistemological and moral relations to environments,
to materialities, to their conditions basically.
So in somewhat simpler terms I'm looking at the ways
in which there are specific attachments or identifications
with nature in African-American literature,
whether there is domination of nature or rather identification --
that would be the questions.   This ad I showed -- I just want
to emphasize three basic points I'm looking at in the antebellum period,
which I've been focusing on here at the Library of Congress
in my research primarily.
First, there is the aspect of vision.
So I look at how, for example,
the fugitive slave narrative has a different mode of envisioning --
of visually relating and perceiving nature --
than, you know, for example, mainstream transcendentalists have.
The second aspect would be that of labor.
So what does it mean to actually work with environments
under slavery, but also more general terms?
So how does that shape, well, the human's relation
to natural environments, having actually to do work
but not just going there, you know, in their free time?
And the third aspect is, you know, the involvement
in the whole abolitionist debate and on the other side,
the pro-slavery debate of nature, of, you know, referring to nature
as something to justify -- and this might actually,
well link in with your argument, Jean-Francois --
to justify or on the same ground
of having nature to, well, dejustify slavery.
So basically both sides are in a sense drawing on nature;
one side saying, you know, slavery's unnatural,
the other side saying slavery's total natural
because that's how they were made, what they were made for.
You know? So to conclude, those three aspects are central
to what I'm looking at in the antebellum period.
And then I'm going with those ideas,
and with those aspects I'm going further and trying to see how
in the African-American literary tradition that emerges then
in the second half the 19th Century we actually always --
whenever there are reflections
on slavery there is also an environmental consciousness involved
that comes from that perspective and that is transformed of course.
And that in this sense I think I'm at the very distinct [inaudible]
to the moral landscapes involved
in environmental imagination and knowledge.
So, yeah. [Laughter]
>> Carolyn Brown: [Inaudible] go ahead.
>> David Grinspoon: Well, I actually a question or response to something
that Jean-Francois said, which is this analogy between the crime,
if you will, of slavery and the crime, if you will,
of what we're doing to earth's climate with fossil fuels.
In many ways I think it is a good one because it helps draw attention
to the sort of the moral deficit of what we're doing
and what we assume is necessary to power our civilization,
and as you point out that previous time it was seen as a necessary evil
to power their civilization.
But with slavery, it's very clear who the victim of that crime is.
It's obvious, it's the slaves.
With this Anthropocene crime or climate crime of fossil fuels
that you mention, it's -- I wonder what the analogy is there.
Who's the victim?
Because part of what I've been realizing with the sort
of changing views that I see emerging
in the environmental communities as a result
of the Anthropocene is this realization that the separation
that we make between ourselves and the natural world is
in some sense a false dichotomy, and it's a damaging false dichotomy.
In a way that's part of the crime itself is that we see
that separation; wherein reality whatever we do
to the earth we're ultimately doing to ourselves or to our descendants.
So if we see it that way,
then in that analogy who's the victim of this crime?
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: So I think I would answer two different things.
It's true that in the case
of slavery the victims are more clearly identified,
although there is -- I would add a caveat to that.
You know, the famous dichotomy between the slaves and the master,
and the fact that masters also are degraded by the use
of slaves at various levels.   So on the one hand, you know,
the crime of slavery doesn't affect only the slaves;
it also affects the masters.
And in fact, you could say, you know, for example,
there was several reports in the 1960s that showed the legacy
of slavery and segregation deep into the US and how it affected --
it still affects the US, you know, because of the legacy of poverty
and other things that have been, you know,
attributed to slavery and the segregation era.
So that's one answer.
The second answer is that it's true that global climate change,
for example, will probably affect everybody
and perhaps even affect us more
because of higher latitudes might be affected more
by the change in climate.
However, because we are far richer than most of the people living
in the global south we can shield a lot of these problems and adversity.
So, you know, there still is, I think, a moral case that,
you know -- and the other if you see what I was forgetting is
if you see we are also more responsible
because we contribute far more to the problem than most
of the people in the global south.
And we are also richer so we can shield ourselves
from most of the consequences.
So I still think there is a strong dichotomy
between who's creating the problem and who's suffering from it.
So I think the analogy works also on that account.
>> David Grinspoon: Yeah.
It's interesting because I agree with you, and then I also --
a different frame would says that that perception of when you say "we"
of not meaning "we, the people of earth" is part of the problem.
You know? And so that's funny because, Carolyn,
in your introduction you said something
about we realize we live on an It.   But what is the It?
And then I was thinking, "Well,
another thing we can ask is who is the We?"
>> Matthias Klestil: The point is, of course,
that we are part of the It, right?
Because if you think about it, I mean, humans are animals
if one sense and what does that imply?
But I wanted to comment on, you know, this analogy you're drawing
between slavery and the conditions there
and this argument and this inevitability.
I think one of the differences from my perspective would be that,
you know, in the case of slavery you had the ones abused speaking, right?
So we had a human language to understand someone
who spoke to you about the abuse.
And now the question is: If we talk about environments,
there's the question, "How do environments speak to us?"
Which is, like, from an ecocritical perspective would be about --
also question about -- mediation and representation
because we are always perceiving basically environments.
We cannot perceive them unmediated.
You know, there's this idea of an unmediated flux basically,
that environments are somehow there but that you cannot perceive them
out of your human perspective.
So I think that would be an interesting thing
that this analogy draws attention to that we have to kind
of understand how that works in terms of mediation,
how we could actually maybe also
from a scientific perspective actually make claims
about what nature is or environments are doing to us.
I mean, there's always contested theories, of course.
I mean, there's not just one climate change theory, right?
So it's claims, it's scientific evidence, but what is the language
that we should choose to respond to, right?
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: Okay, can I respond to that?
Again, I would have two responses to this.
The first one is that in the crime
of slavery not all the harm was immediately mediated
and immediately available to people.
Think about absentee plantation owners, people living in the UK
or even in the north of the US who had slaves,
who benefited from the incomes of slaves.
They owned slaves in the south or they owned slaves in the Caribbean,
but they never [inaudible] slave themselves.
They never really took part in the crime itself directly.
You know, it was mediated.
And in many respects we have exactly the same issues
with the cause of climate change.
The other thing is that there are a lot of people who speak of,
"You see, the environment itself doesn't speak."
But there are people --
>> Matthias Klestil: [Inaudible] the language we can't understand.
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: Yes.
Yes, but winds and hurricanes and droughts.
I still doubt that they have language,
but we could speak about that.
But anyway, there are people who suffer from this, from the effects
of droughts, from the effects of hurricanes who speak.
And in fact, we listen to them all the time.
If we want to listen to them, we just open the TV and we hear reports
about people suffering in Haiti.
Haiti is one of the countries that is likely
to be most affected by climate change.
Look at what happened in Haiti.
Open your TV and you'll see these people crying
to you all the time about, you know, already with the suffering.
There are about 150 people who die every year
because of climate change according to WHO reports in 2004.
So the victims are here that speaking to us.
But similarly to slave owners who had a vested interest in not --
you know, as Upton Sinclair said, "It's very hard
to make someone understand something when his job
or his lifestyle depends on him not understanding this thing."
And we're in the same situation.
You know, we love the use of, you know, all these machines
that some people call "energy slave" actually.
It's a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s
to describe machines that are run by oil, coal, and powered artificially
by fossil fuels that do the work that used to be done by slaves
and servants in our homes or in our fields.
So these energy slaves provide us a lot of services that used
to be provided by slaves.
And we enjoy this, and we don't want to change it.
This is why, I think, you know --
there's a very good book that I would encourage everybody
in this audience to read called Merchants of Doubt.
It's a book about how the fossil fuel lobbies have tried
to discredit the science of climate change in the past.
And this is a very good book,
but I think it doesn't explain really why people are so inclined
to believe the contrarians on the science of climate change.
I think the real reason is
because we don't really want to believe that.
You know, it's like if you go to a doctor and they tell you,
"You have a cancer," you know?
You keep asking another doctor to see whether it's true.
You don't want to believe.
And the Anthropocene is the same thing.
You know, the earth -- some people have made this analogy
that the earth has a cancer.
We're trying -- you know, you're smoking, you have a cancer,
you don't really want to stop smoking.
You know, you know you should.
>> David Grinspoon: Well, then we're just not good at --
we're not wired to believe things
that we don't have direct sensory evidence for.
And some of the best arguments for climate change are abstract
and depend on looking at graphs and models and things.
And we're just --
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: This is why [inaudible] energy
with slavery speaks to people better.
>> David Grinspoon: But, you know, here's another analogy that gets
at some of the maybe unique moral questions of the Anthropocene.
You know, humans are not the first species
to cause a global environmental catastrophe on earth.
In fact, 2.2 billion years ago the cyanobacteria came along,
and in order to find a better way to make energy and to power
in their world, they did something that caused the extinction
of nearly every other species on earth.
And what they did was they discovered solar energy.
And they started doing photosynthesis.
And that led to the build up of oxygen,
what's called "the great oxygenation event" 2.2 billion years ago,
which caused mass extinctions because oxygen believe it
or not is poisonous for organic life, unless you evolved
as our ancestors fortunately did to use that as a power source.
And so these cyanobacteria, in order
to evolve this better power source did this, you know,
what we might consider an unspeakable crime:
They changed the earth in a way that wiped out most species.
Now, when I've talked about the Anthropocene
to some biologists I know who are critics of this concept,
because they think, "Well this is arrogant to think that.
Why should we name a geological age after ourselves?
We're not so different from other species."
And they point out, well, the cyanobacteria changed the earth.
So how are we fundamentally really so different from that?
And obviously, I think the answer has to do with responsibility
because for however limited our consciousness
and our intelligence may be, we do have some ability to see the future
and to picture the results of our actions.
And I think it's an acceptable statement
to say the cyanobacteria do not share that ability.
So in some sense we're given the benefit of these abilities we have
where we're sort of committing a new kind of crime.
But then again, thinking about the victims on a short-term scale, yeah,
there's winners and losers like you were saying.
But on a longer timescale if we don't learn how to live
with these abilities of technology and precognition that we have,
our society will not survive.
So if you switch your frame to a longer timescale, then I still have
to ask, you know, who are really the victims of this crime?
>> Carolyn Brown: I'd like to open the conversation to the audience
if there's some questions or comments you'd like to make.
Yeah?   >> [Inaudible]
>> Carolyn Brown: Oh, yes.   That's right.
Mics.
>> Evidence -- possibly any literary precedence for the fact
that you've kind of alluded to Mother Nature always bats last,
but is there a universal justice taking place here
where maybe Ebola virus, you know, the hurricanes,
etc. is kind of payback time for all the clutter we've caused
and problems we've caused?
>> David Grinspoon: Interesting way of looking at it.
James Lovelock, who devised the Gaia Hypothesis,
which is this revolutionary idea of in fact seeing the earth
as in some sense a global living organism.
The Gaia Hypothesis.
He wrote a book more recently called The Revenge of Gaia
where he's saying this is what's happening, it is payback time.
Personally, I don't find that that useful an idea.
I mean, I suppose it's a way you could look at it.
But how does that help us?
It doesn't move us forward in terms of accepting responsibility
and figuring out how, you know, are we going to proceed into the future
with these abilities to run the world whether we
like having them or not.
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: If I could just add a little bit to that.
I think, you know, I also don't really ascribe to this idea
of the earth as an organism that would have,
you know, independent thinking.
But I think there are some interesting ironies in history
that I think I like to think about.
One of them is, you know, I'm not saying, for example,
fossil fuels are per se something bad.
And in fact, one of the example that Al Gore in his movie,
An Inconvenient Truth about climate change,
one of the pictures he uses is a picture of Haiti.
And because I study Haiti, it's obviously very interesting for me,
but he shows this picture which is actually a National Geography
picture of 1989 of this border between Haiti
and the Dominican Republic.
And he uses this as an example of a country that doesn't really care
for its own environment because there's almost no trees
on the Haitian side of the picture.   And on the Dominican Republic side
of the picture there are lots of trees.
And he used this as an example of bad governance.
When in fact it's more a story not of bad governance,
but of what happens to a country where there's no fossil fuels.
There's almost no fossil fuels in Haiti,
and that's why almost all the trees are cut.
So, you know, fossil fuels are useful to us.
And as you said, we just need
to find the right balance in the way we use them.
>> Matthias Klestil: I just want to add to that that idea of, you know,
that we have to pay basically.
I think this might be interesting in terms --
I don't know about if it is time to pay or I don't want to argue
about that, but I think it is an interesting narrative in a sense
to have because you have to think about strategies
to alter our perception, right, and to alter --
to urge us -- to do something.
So I think in itself there is a narrative in this idea
that you would have, you know, pay the price at some point
that could be used and that has been used.
I mean, if you think about Hollywood films like The Day
After Tomorrow or something like that.
I mean, that --
>> David Grinspoon: And it does relate to this idea
that we've been building up a deficit, the moral deficit,
which in a certain sense we can't continue to build
up that moral debt without some payback.
>> Matthias Klestil: So the question how we can use those narratives even
if we don't buy into them maybe.
But what that does in very material terms, in the end what effects
that could trigger, you know?
I think this is an interesting thought from that perspective.
>> Carolyn Brown: I just want to say the issue
of narrative is really very interesting because part
of what's particularly striking about Matthias' work is his focus
on the different narratives about the relationship of human beings
and nature from the transcendentalists
of the 19th Century and the African --
well then they were black I guess; I can't remember the terminology
at that point -- but we say the African-American perspective
on exactly the same landscape at the same time.
But two different narratives about what that --
it is that I was calling out there.
So I think as we talk about the narratives for our time
and the different narratives, whether it's, you know, payback
or some other narrative, the narratives that Matthias referred
to in the blogosphere about Obama and what's appropriate.
It's the stories we tell ourselves have a lot of power and we need
to pay attention at least to what they are.
Another question.   >> [Inaudible]
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: If I --
just in the meantime if I just could say something very quickly
about the payback and one of the thoughts.
There is an interesting idea I think that slavery was abolished in part
because we managed to substitute fossil fuels and machines powered
by fossil fuels to abolish slavery.
And it's interesting if you think that now it's almost like if we got
out of the hook because of the fact that we could use fossil fuels.
And we got into this fossil fuel dependency because of that.
And it's interesting that now it's time to pay back in a way
because fossil fuels are not dependency either.
You know, because they are also problems with this.
It's as if -- I find it ironical but I leave to you have a question.
Sorry.
>> I simply wanted to follow up a bit on one of Carolyn's points
Most of the narratives that I've heard so far are largely --
I mean, you get through the back door a little on African-American --
but they're largely western narratives.
And I'm wondering if you include
or if you encounter another fora attempts
to introduce alternative narratives.
And I bring this up as an anthropologist who did fieldwork
in northern Congo, where people hunting and horticulture people
that I lived with not only had practical ways
of preserving their wildlife -- of living in relation to the wildlife
in what they call "their forest," of alternating hunting seasons
with non-hunting ones and so on --
but they also really had an interesting concept
that there's a balance of life between lives
in the village and lives in the forest.
And if a hunter took too much game, he would literally be accused
of playing on the dark side.
And if anyone in his lineage got sick or died, he would be accused
in open court of trafficking with their lives in order
to gain more lives from the forest.
So it's a clear narrative of the interdependence of life
in the forest and life in the village and of the darkness
of taking too much life out of the forest, that if you do that,
you in fact kill your own kind, your own kin,
and your own lineage ultimately.
And I'm wondering if you encounter those kinds of helpful examples
from narratives from small-scale indigenous cultures,
whether historic or present.
And I bring it up because the only one I ever hear cited is
"Easter Island, Easter Island, Easter Island.
Look what those primitives did to their islands,
they slaughtered all the trees."
So I'm wondering if you hear any alternative narratives that take
as models for our emulation -- narratives from the third world.
>> David Grinspoon: So one very common theme --
I would almost say mean --   in sort of prewestern
or preChristian indigenous world views all
around the world is this notion of a sort of animate earth
that gave rise to humanity, to us.
And there's the famous Chief Seattle quote
that I guess is actually a [inaudible], but is so widespread
and sums this up and it's beautiful wherever it actually came from,
you know, about, you know, the earth does not belong to us,
we belong to it and, you know, the rivers being our blood, and,
you know, the sky being our lungs.
You know, those notions of the earth as a living entity that we are bound
to are very common in other cultures.
And in a certain sense I think that the narrative emerging
out of the Anthropocene is some kind
of scientifically-guided return maybe to that sort of narrative
where the false dichotomy of seeing ourselves as separate
from nature has actually led to some dangerous behavior that we have
to outgrow perhaps by rediscovering some elements
of that kind of a world view.
>> Carolyn Brown: Yeah, question over here?
>> As we, you know, we delve deeper into the computer age and the talk
of the singularity, when that day comes do you see us maybe having
more answers or solutions these problems, environmental problems?
Or do you see the distance growing farther apart between us
and the third world countries in term of our impact?
I mean, just any foresight on where that might take us in terms
of computers becoming self-aware and us really being in a place
where a lots happening that we don't have a lot of control over.
>> David Grinspoon: Okay.   So he mentioned the singularity.
And maybe some of you don't know what he's talking about.
But it's this idea that artificial intelligence is going
to reach a point where machines become conscious, perhaps soon,
and that that's going to really change everything.
And I don't know if I actually believe that narrative,
that version of the future, but I certainly think it's possible.
I think that we don't know enough about how brains work
and what the capabilities of machines are
to know whether that's coming or not.
And I think it's very hard to predict
if that happens what it's going to do to our world,
and anybody that thinks they can is --
well, they're entertaining to read what they think,
but I don't believe that anybody knows.
But it is a potential game changer,
and in that sense I find it strangely hopeful because I do think
that thinking of the long-term sustainability
of human civilization what we need are some game changers.
And I certainly regard one slightly less radical aspect
of the technological development, just that the world's becoming
so much more interconnected, that with this little device I can,
you know, see what a friend of mine in Egypt has to say today
about what's going on, you know?
And, you know, that some of these boundaries are falling away.
I regard that as very positive as far as this development
in some sense of an ability to think
and act globally that we really need.
So I see technology as perhaps helping us through this effort
to deal with the Anthropocene.
And as far as some of these radical shifts that you're talking about,
I think that they're possible.   Nobody really knows.
>> Carolyn Brown: I think we can do one last question.
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: If I can just say a few words.
I think from the perspective of historians it's interesting to look
at what people in the past thought about the future,
and also the observation that a lot of the solutions that were thought
of as solution yesterday became our problem today.
For example, you know, I mentioned the impact of fossil fuels
to have maybe abolished slavery.
And now we have a problem of, you know, fossil fuels as a new problem.
If you think about what people wrote in the 1950s about nuclear energy
and how this was branded as something absolutely fantastic,
that, you know, you would produce energy
so cheaply you wouldn't even need to meter it, okay?
And now, you know, you see what nuclear energy might be part
of some solution, but, you know, it's not dependency,
again, of any of our problems.
You know, there's also the hope, for example, in the realm of energy
that you could create unlimited energy
by nuclear fusion as opposed to fission.
Fusion could -- it's a nonpolluting -- you know, if you manage to do it.
The problem is we don't know how to do it.
But my observation as a historian would be to say that even
if we manage to do fusion and produce unlimited energy,
I still think it would not be a good idea.
Why? Because it would give us unlimited power in a similar way
that fossil fuels have given us an enormous power already on earth.
And if you read, again, this book that I've mentioned.
It is a wonderful book, Something New Under the Sun:
An Environmental History of the 20th Century World.
If you read that book, you will see how, you know, what we've done
with this power in the 20th Century.
And if we have unlimited power, I'm very pessimistic
about what we can do with them.
>> David Grinspoon: So I have to ask Paul a question then:
What would make you optimistic?
So, you know, obviously we need power.
If unlimited, cheap, free power would not --
I mean, I agree with you.   It would cause problems.
But in your ideal scenario,
what would be the breakthrough that we would have?
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: A change in the moral landscape.
[Laughter]   >> David Grinspoon: Good answer.
That's harder, though.   >> Jean-Francois Mouhot: Yes.
>> Carolyn Brown: It seems like we should stop there.
It's such a perfect ending,
but I did promise one more question so we'll proceed.
>> Thank you.
Well, with the recognition with the sort of cultural conscience
about evil and so on, and question about where that came from,
but it's hard not to think about animals, frankly,
and industrialized farming.
And, you know, we see those pictures, we know that's cruel.
We eat the meat that, you know, the battery cages,
and then the degradation of people who work on it and so on.
And where does that fit in concern with the moral landscape, you know,
you're talking about voice and voiceless.
So is that part of what's being studied among the scholars
at the center?   >> Carolyn Brown: Yeah,
I don't think we have anyone who's focused on that at the moment.
We select scholars based on, you know, proposals that they send us.
We don't work from a theme.
So in this case the theme just came together.
But it's quite possible at some point
that that would, you know, turn up.
>> David Grinspoon: It's a great question.
And certainly it relates in a broad sense to, you know,
the need for power in the sense of, you know,
actual power to run machines and so forth.
It's not the only need that our society has
that we acquire at some moral cost.
And obviously, we feed ourselves and that's another one.
So certainly in the broad landscape of the Anthropocene and, you know,
there's even a history there.
You know, we started doing agriculture, which seems harmless,
but by doing that we started to cut down the forests.
And that was really the beginning of climate change.
And so as is true about how we power ourselves, it's also true
about how we feed ourselves, that we don't really know a way to do
that that's completely without cost.
But as we go forward into the future it's one of the things we need
to be cognizant of as we, you know, try to build a sustainable society
that is also, you know, fits
within a moral landscape that's to our liking.
>> Carolyn Brown: Yeah.
As we come to our conclusion maybe I'll let each
of our panelists have one minute of final thoughts and comments.
And then if you want to continue the conversation,
you can do so informally.   So let's start with Matthias.
>> Matthias Klestil: Right.
Well, I think that from my perspective what ecocriticism does
-- so the literary studies within environmental consciousness;
studying literature and text and culture in a broader sense
and with an environmental consciousness --
I think what we can bring actually to the table
and what we can do is analyze how basically representations work
and what they trigger materially, eventually.
And we can see how powerful certain narratives are, for example,
and assess in a sense what -- how literature could, you know,
have the potential to change such narratives.
If you think just as an example of maybe the most famous example
of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and how
that discourse basically because it was not just scientific,
but it was a narrative.
It was a very powerful way of putting the problem basically:
How that triggers change,
that basically banishing pesticide not completely,
but DDT basically reducing that.
And so I think that we have to look at those narratives
and what might be most effective at transforming them.
And just as a follow up on the question before about the, you know,
alternative narratives, I think
that African-American culture does have a certain
alternative narrative.
And, you know, the text I'm looking at,
for example Zora Neale Hurston short stories,
there are more holistic views of nature where, you know,
you have rivers talking and telling stories,
and kind of magical realism.
So that I think there is an alternative tradition certainly
also there.
And there is, of course, more to explore as, you know,
ecocriticism generally globalizes at the moment.
There's branches of ecocritical organizations emerging
in Asia and Europe.   So it's not anymore US-focused.
>> Carolyn Brown: Yeah.   Last word, Jean-Francois?
>> Jean-Francois Mouhot: Yes.   I'll try to be very brief.
I think if there's one thing I'd
like to say is I think people working the humanities have --
and I hope, you know, you've been interested by this conversation --
but I hope you will come out of this room thinking
that humanities have something to offer, even thinking about sciences
and issues like -- you know, that belongs to physics
like the Anthropocene and entering into the Anthropocene.
It has a lot of implications.   I think scholars working
in the humanities can continue to think about.
So if you have any questions, I'd be very happy
to talk with you afterwards.
>> Carolyn Brown: And the last, last word, David.
>> David Grinspoon: Well, yeah.
Thank you all, again, for coming to this.
It's been really interesting for me.
You know, it's fascinating to look at the stories
and the metaphors we use as we struggle to come
to grips with our role on earth.
We often hear these disease metaphors:
Humans are a virus, humans are a cancer.
We have the metaphor of crime, you know,
that we're doing these unspeakable crimes to the oceans
and to the climate and so forth.
Another metaphor that appeals to me is almost that thinking of humanity
as a baby or a very young child that finds itself
in some environment it doesn't quite know how to conduct itself.
In a certain sense, also, when we're doing things to the earth,
we're doing things to ourselves.   So it's a kind of self-mutilation.
So what we have here really is a child that's hurting itself
and needs to learn how to stop.
And unfortunately, there aren't any adults around.
[Laughter]   >> Jean-Francois Mouhot:
That's where the Easter Island example works.
Yes.
>> David Grinspoon: And so we have to do it ourselves.
We have to learn to become a new kind of entity on this world
that has the maturity and the awareness
to handle being a global species with the power to change our planet
and use that power in a way that is conducive to the kind
of global society we want to have.
And in the service of that since we, you know --
although science fiction fantasies of intelligent aliens coming
and saying, "Here's how to do it," you know, which I'm still hoping
that we'll get that SETI message any day now
and they'll tell us how to get out of this mess.
But in the absence of that we need all of the insights we can get
from literature, from looking at history, and from science.
And we just have to figure out how to do it ourselves.
>> Carolyn Brown: On that note, thank you all for coming.
And -- [Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.